The difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0

Came across the following quote by Joseph Lassiter of HBS on rkgblog:

The biggest single difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 is that today you tend to get one 46-year-old CEO in Web 2.0 companies, whereas in Web 1.0 companies you got two 23-year-old-co-CEOs… People are older, wiser, and to some extent, more jaded.

Mass Probiotics: winner at Babson Founder's day

Just learned that Feed Resource was the first runner up in the Babson Founder's day biz plan competition.

The winner was Mass Probiotics. I thought that Mass Probiotics was a good presentation and a very viable business in a very short period of time. Dave(?) presented impressive high growth and low growth financials on the project. Will write more details about it some other time.

Babson Founder's Day Biz Plan Competition

Attended the Douglass Foundation Graduate Business Plan Competition at Babson College on April 19th. Business Plan presentations were given by the three finalists and summary can be found here.

Feed Resource Recovery is modeled to utilize the discarded food waste in to a source of renewable energy. The idea is to operationalize the concept of anaerobic digestion in portable format to the restaurants and super markets where there is bound to be food waste. Feed Resource guys have already won the second place at Global Social Venture competition. MTC is looking in to providing some funding to this project. Lets wish them well.

Alternative Energy

Lately, I have been thinking about alternative/clean/renewable energy sources. Does that mean I am interested in the energy sector? Also, there is more press coverage about the alternative energy stories. Recent Time magazine cover story on global warming is a good read.

There is a lot of activity happening in the Cambridge, MA area along with the MIT. Prometheus institute has a lot of good information and they publish a PV News magazine. Their one page primer on Solar energy is worth a read.

Babson has two active Energy clubs. Babson Energy forum has an event on April 13th - the day of our first Face-to-Face for the Electives. Talking about electices, I am taking two electives - Global Strategic Management (MOB7559) and Managing a Growing Business (EPS7520) in Summer I. Professor Rangan teaches GSM and Professor Edward Marram teaches MGB. I have gone through the syllabus and both of them should be quite interesting. We will be meeting Jan 06 Section B people for the first time in class. Looking forward to it.

Thats it for now. Ciao.

National Business Systems

Sucessfully (will have to wait for a week to quite say that) Completed ModIV. After a gruelling 3 hour MGE exam, NBS did not seem that bad. As NBS was a group project everyone of our group members worked hard to get the paper out on Venezuela. Report came out to be 31 pages and we are quite happy about it.

We had struggled with the bibliography as MS Word did not offer a great and easy solution to handle the references/bibliography. At least, we were not aware of how to get them done in MS Word. I have looked at BibShare but it had steep learning curve. Another service on the web easyBib seems to be web based and can be accessed from anywhere and uses both MLA and PLA citation styles. Will have to look in to it.

Using LaTeX and doing bibliography using bibTeX was so much better when I was in graduate school. There are couple of flavors of MS Windows based TeX processing engines - mikTeX and http://www.hi.is/~tpr/latex/index.html. Will have to give it a try to see if it has the GUI interface and if the others in my group would want to use it or not.

For the time being, I am done with the Core courses and just picked up Prof. Rangan's course Global Strategic Management course material from the bookstore - at least 30 *big* cases in this course pack (~ 750 pages!). I am sure there is going to be a lot of reading involved in it.

But, for now, I am going to take it easy and get focused on Collagist.